BFT23 - From Rome to Irsina via Ruoti

 

On our last morning in Rome we woke up early, made sure the apartment was clean, and headed off by bus and subway toward the central train station to pick up our rental car for the next leg of our trip.

Every major city in Europe has a central train station. American cities used to have them, and sometimes you can still find one that hasn’t been converted into loft space, brew pubs, kitschy shopping, and/or parking lots, but for the most part train service in the US has been forcibly limited to freight and daily commuters. Unless you live in the Northeast Corridor the idea of intercity passenger rail has largely receded into the past and the US is poorer for it. Railroads are still the most cost-effective way to move people and goods over land, after all.

We were at the central train station in both Rome and Prague – both times to rent a car – and both times the place was packed with travelers. Both times the place was also completely impenetrable, utterly unnavigable, and a fountain of chaos that not even GPS could figure out, so maybe a certain cosmic balance was achieved after all.

We found the train station easily enough – it’s the big crowded building with all the people and train tracks, oddly enough – and headed in to find the rental car counter. You have to do that more or less at the time allotted or you run the risk of them giving away your car, so we were on deadline.

After touring much of the station and a good part of the surrounding neighborhood, trailing our luggage behind us the whole way, we finally found the area where the rental car agencies were located. The polite gentleman at the Hertz counter helpfully pointed us to the agency where we actually were renting the car, and a few moments later we were in the little alcove where we needed to be. The car was in Kim’s name and she took care of the actual rental process, after which we were told to go out that door, turn left, go down the block until, well, just keep going, you’ll get there, and when we got there we were to enter the parking garage on the right. Or something like that. The details were a bit hazy, and in the end the garage was a good ten minute walk away but we found it eventually, presented our paperwork, and were directed to the World’s Smallest Fiat – a black Fiat Speck, or something like that.

That is actually a later picture of it, parked in an olive grove in Alberobello, but it is here presented for scale. There were four of us on this trip, each with a backpack and a carry-on-sized piece of luggage, and no amount of four-dimensional Tetris would get that luggage into the unnecessarily sloped rear hatch area so we ended up with a couple of things on our laps. Kim was the driver the whole time as she is the only one of us who can drive a manual transmission car. Oliver and Lauren are more susceptible to motion sickness than I am so they alternated in the passenger seat. I was in the back the whole time, often navigating and sometimes just staring out the window as Italy rolled by. Getting in and out of the back seat of the Speck was enough of a trick that I still, a month later, have a scar on my left knee from the process.

On the other hand, though, it was reliable, incredibly fuel efficient, had enough power to get the four of us up the steep hairpin curves of southern Italy, and was small enough to fit on the roads, many of which were approximately the size of the average American dinner table. There’s a reason that folding side mirrors are standard equipment on Italian cars.

We packed ourselves into the Speck. Kim spent a few minutes reacquainting herself with the mysteries of the standard transmission. We worked our way around the guy who had parked at the top of the driveway leading out of the parking garage. And then – we were off toward our destination of Irsina.

I’m not really sure why we picked Irsina. It’s a lovely mountain town in Basilicata in the southern part of Italy, home to a surprisingly large expat community from across the western world, and conveniently located to any number of places we’d hoped to visit, so there are many reasons to choose from I suppose. Any or all would do. It worked out well, at any rate. It’s about a four or five hour drive from Rome.

We dodged and weaved our way out of Rome and then found ourselves on the highway heading south toward Naples.

One of the things that was on our To Do list was to get Italian road food, so as it got toward lunchtime we stopped at an Autogrille – the Italian equivalent of an American highway rest stop. Except that Italians do not seem to tolerate the low quality of food that rest stops have in the US. The Autogrille had fresh sandwiches with salamis and cheeses on crusty rolls, hot pastas and other foods, and a wide assortment of desserts, snacks, and drinks. It was surprisingly tasty.

The roads got smaller and more twisty as we headed south and then east across Italy. You see a great many towns perched precariously on top of steep and easily defensible hills, and you go across a lot of bridges that span valleys where the ground can be 400 meters (a quarter mile) below you. It’s scenic, but not for the faint of heart.

And then we took what turned out to be a longer detour than we’d thought it would be.

When we were planning this trip, we looked at the route from Rome to Irsina and saw that just a short jog from the way that Google Maps was taking us – maybe 20 minutes out of our way – was the village of Ruoti. For most people this probably would not be a notable fact, but for me it was an opportunity. My great-grandparents were born in Ruoti and came from there to the US in the early 20th century. I don’t know when my great-grandfather emigrated, but I do know he was in the US in December 1907 when my great-grandmother and their eldest surviving daughter arrived. My grandfather was born in Philadelphia four and a half years later. So this was a place I wanted to see.

It was even more attractive because my friend Anita had done some research and found my great-grandmother’s birth record, which not only said that she was born in 1870 but also gave the address. Anita also sent me a Google Map screenshot of the house and where it was located, and this was one of the things that I wanted to see.

Ruoti is an Italian hilltop town of about 3500 people, a long way from pretty much anything else. I figured we’d get there, wander around a bit, see the house, perhaps eat dinner if the timing worked out, and be on our way. An hour, maybe ninety minutes tops, if we didn't stay for dinner. In the end it turned out to be much more than that, and for me one of the highlights of the trip.

We came into town from the north after a long climb up a small and twisty road, parked at the first legal spot we saw, and headed off to explore the place. We started at the modern end of things.

You get some gorgeous views as well from the top of that hill.

And then we explored some of the older parts of town, the places that would have been there when my great-grandparents were there.

At some point we found a small store and went in. It turned out that the guy working there had the same last name as my great-grandfather – about a third of the town does, apparently – so we had a lovely time talking with him. We bought some cookies and drinks and a giant loaf of crusty bread, maybe 50cm (20 inches) across and a handspan high, and went on our way.

Eventually we found my great-grandmother’s house. It’s not actually on the main street that you see here.

It’s on an alleyway that comes off the main street. You have to climb down a set of stairs to get there, and there is only the one house that fronts onto it. According to the little plaque on the wall it was originally built in the late Roman period, though it has been upgraded since then. It looks pretty modern now, in fact.

It is a strange thing to stand there in front of a house like that, knowing the significance of it for your family.

But after a while you realize that the house isn’t going to change, so you continue wandering around and taking pictures. Eventually we found ourselves back at the starting point of the street, where we discovered that Ruoti has a self-guided walking tour that you can take. It led up to my great-grandmother’s house (which was the second stop on the tour, and the reason for the plaque) and from there throughout the old town. We’ll do that, we thought, and then head off.

But before we got to the house we met these two ladies, whose names we never did get unfortunately. I’d manage to memorize the Italian for “My great-grandparents came from Ruoti” and pointed down the street to the house, and suddenly we found ourselves deep in conversation! They spoke no English. I had Google Translate. Kim had two years of DuoLingo Italian. And it more or less worked. Eventually two more women from across the way joined in, and then they sent down Sara and Rosario, who actually did speak English.

Rosario and Sara ended up giving us a ninety-minute tour of the old part of Ruoti, including churches, key sites, and even Rosario’s house. They also took us to the local B&B, where the proprietor welcomed us in.

We saw some of the artwork that they’ve put up to celebrate the town’s history – the first one is Michele Carlucci, “an illustrious oenologist and winemaker at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries … mainly associated with the Asprinio vine, known as the Ruoti nectar,” according to the plaque nearby, and the second one is Angela Acquavia, who brought Lucanian red peppers to America in 1887.

They also introduced us to Felice, who it turns out is doing a research project on the descendants of people who emigrated from Ruoti so we had a lot to talk about. He invited us to come back the next day which unfortunately did not work out but we’ve been emailing back and forth ever since and I’ve enjoyed the conversation immensely.

We’ll have to go back someday and spend more time there. It’s a welcoming place.

But we had to get to Irsina to meet our hosts by a certain time, so we left Ruoti and continued on our way. An hour or so later we found our way up the steep road into Irsina and – after a few missed attempts, as it is tucked rather out of the usual line of sight from the road as you’re driving by – located our apartment for the next few days.

It was an immense place, big enough to swallow the apartment we had in Rome and the one in Prague combined, with room left over, and a comfortable one. It was late when we got in, though, even by Italian standards, and we didn’t manage to figure out a place to eat dinner. Fortunately we were able to wander up to the corner and find Rocco and his grocery.

Rocco was closing up by then – it was nearly 10pm – but he sold us a dozen eggs for a pittance and we took them back up to the apartment. We lit candles and sat out on the porch and ate the bread from Ruoti with butter and jam we’d carried from Rome, along with cherries and fresh scrambled eggs, and we talked about life plans and linguistics and Johnny Cash and whether Lauryn Hill’s version of Killing Me Softly was the definitive version or whether that was Roberta Flack’s version, and we admired the view of the medieval part of Irsina across the gorge from where we sat, and there are quiet evenings after busy days that will stay in your memory for a long time, and this was one of them.